B. not to go to -current/-stable and instead just install patches manually..

im kind of confused, i've used FBSD for almost 7 months (2 years ago) and gentoo for a little over a year (until this past november) and i always liked ports and thought it was a good addition.

can anyone give me some input, also.. i can't find specifically in the faq about updating from generic(release?) to -stable / -current.

any help?

FreeBSD and Gentoo are moving targets. For all practical purposes
those are rolling releases operating systems. In practical sense
they work only on i386 and amd64 and they are optimized for speed.
In both cases ports and portages have many knobs that you can turn
on or off to optimize packet to your specific purpose.

OpenBSD is security appliance. It is extremely portable and able to work across the range of different architectures. The coolest version of OpenBSD
IMHO is sparc64. It has cascade release cycle (six months like CentOS for instance).
Userland is complete unlike FreeBSD for instance and it is configured to be as safe as possible out of box.
Ports are add-ons. They are not carefully audited for security and they usually bring whole slue of security issues to the OpenBSD installation.
The ultimate goal of OpenBSD packaging system is reproducibility so that
system stays as safe as possible. Ports are compiled with very conservative options and there are only minor things that can be tuned.
Those are called flavors. Allowing them to be tweaked like on FreeBSD will completely undermine security.

One could argue that compiling things from source using ports on OpenBSD is safer than installing binary tarballs. That is fine. But unless
you back port new versions of the software or port it yourself the ports will compile on identical way for six months. There is no way that you can
use stable OpenBSD as a moving target. If you want that follow current.
Current is IMHO as stable as FreeBSD stable for about 3 months during the
release cycle. However usually in May, June or November and December things might break as the developers are making major changes to OpenBSD.

FreeBSD and Gentoo are moving targets. For all practical purposes
those are rolling releases operating systems. In practical sense
they work only on i386 and amd64 and they are optimized for speed.
In both cases ports and portages have many knobs that you can turn
on or off to optimize packet to your specific purpose.

OpenBSD is security appliance. It is extremely portable and able to work across the range of different architectures. The best architecture IMHO is sparc64.
It has cascade release cycle (six months like CentOS for instance).
Userland is complete unlike FreeBSD for instance and configure to be as safe as possible out of box.
Ports are add-ons. They are not carefully audited for security and then usually bring whole slue of security issues to the OpenBSD installation.
The ultimate goal of OpenBSD packaging system is reproducibility so that
system stays as safe as possible. Ports are compiled with very conservative options and there are only minor things that can be tuned.
Those are called flavors.

One could argue that compiling things from source using ports on OpenBSD is safer than installing binary tarballs. That is fine. But unless
you back port new versions of the software or port it yourself the ports will compile on identical way for six months. There is no way that you can
use stable OpenBSD as a moving target. If you want that follow current.
Current is IMHO as stable as FreeBSD stable for about 3 months during the
release cycle. However usually in May, June or November and December things might brake as the developers are making major changes to OpenBSD.

can anyone give me some input, also.. i can't find specifically in the faq about updating from generic(release?) to -stable / -current.

any help?

thanks for all the info. hopefully you or someone else can give me some info on updating to -curent branch..

If you were aiming to post in one of the FreeBSD subforae, you ended up posting in one of the OpenBSD subforums instead. If these are questions specific for FreeBSD, please repost in the correct forum.

Quote:

not worry about ports, it's a waste of time and slow.

This is a subjective statement. Some may choose to patch because they do not want to go through the effort of compilation. On the other hand, going with -current means that the latest functionality committed to the source tree is available for testing/usage.

If you were aiming to post in one of the FreeBSD subforae, you ended up posting in one of the OpenBSD subforums instead. If these are questions specific for FreeBSD, please repost in the correct forum.

This is a subjective statement. Some may choose to patch because they do not want to go through the effort of compilation. On the other hand, going with -current means that the latest functionality committed to the source tree is available for testing/usage.

As for whether ports should be compiled, or simply installed, the project advocated simple installation unless there are specific reasons for compilation. More information the packages/ports system can be found in Section 15 of the FAQ:

I don't see what the will of some religious deity has to do with the upgrade process of OpenBSD.

-STABLE releases aren't made available in binary form, so you cannot directly upgrade from -RELEASE to -STABLE.. you must either apply errata patches to the source code of an OpenBSD release, or use cvs(1) to update your copy of the source to the -STABLE tree and recompile.

The same goes for -CURRENT, you cannot obtain that in binary form... but you can get something close to it by using snapshot releases that are created periodically for testing and from there you can compile and install -CURRENT, check a local FTP/HTTP mirror for more details.

As has been said, all this terminology and instructions for achieving what you want are on the FAQ.. reading it throughly is a simple requirement of using and understanding this operating system efficiently.

OpenBSD has a steady release cycle -- two releases per year. These days, this is on or about May 1 and November 1.

Releases are very well tested, by large numbers of users. The cycle is approximately 4 months of development and 2 months of testing.

Releases get patches. These patches are for security, availability, or stability. All patches are added to the -stable branch. If the patch is deemed noteworthy enough, it is added to the errata web page.

The -current branch is always available. It is the development branch and is a constantly moving target, except during the -release window.

The user community is encouraged to keep their systems up-to-date. This means, users run -release+errata, -stable, or -current. Running -release, without any patches and connected to a network, is strongly discouraged.

The OS is source maintained. If you run -release+errata or -stable, you are updating source code (manually or automatically) and rebuilding some or all of the OS, respectively. Users who run -current can avoid building the OS, by installing a snapshot of -current, and upgrading from snapshot to snapshot on a frequent basis. However, they may still need to do some port building, when upgrading packages.

There is no need to build from ports, unless necessary, as has been mentioned already. This is because a port, on OpenBSD, builds the package, then installs it. A port you build and a package you install will be contain completely equivalent binary files.

Why would a -current user need to build from ports? Because ... ports (and packages) must be kept in sync with the OS. This is not the case with FreeBSD, but is a drop-dead requirement for OpenBSD. This is primarily due to library dependencies. One can usually upgrade the OS and leave the existing packages installed, because an upgrade will not delete any existing libraries. But when upgrading/installing packages, the package must have been built with the same OS.

Snapshots happen at various times -- quite frequently for the major architectures. And the project makes "snapshot packages" available for the major architectures, too ... but much less frequently. Since there is no guarantee that any snapshot (or, of course, a -current system the user builds themselves) will be in sync with snapshot packages, some manual building of ports may be expected by the snapshot user.

I know a number of -current users who build all their own packages. A friend of mine mentioned he can get the entire i386 package set built in only 55 hours.

-----------

Since there are no library changes between -release and -stable, one can mix and match -release and -stable packages/ports. Unfortunately, there are no longer any -stable packages, and very few -stable ports, though there is an unofficial repository at openbsd.rutgers.edu.

it ended with a bunch of weird characters and such and i had to exit the terminal and reopen it. then i cd'd into /usr/src and ran cvs -d$CVSROOT up -rOPENBSD_4_4 -Pd
but it came with like.. cvs unknown command -- 0 or something.

The FAQ shows #, but ... if the user is a member of wsrc, then they have write access to /usr/src.

While we are on this subject, it should be clarified that while the kernel can be built with a non-root account which is a member of the wsrc group, building the userland still needs to be done as root.

An obvious consequence of building the kernel with a wsrc group account is that the log in message can be customized merely by building with an account which is a member of wsrc. ie.

cvs [server aborted]: out of memory; can not reallocate 6291456 bytes.

Although you haven't stated which CVSync server you are using, I can only guess that you are connecting to one which is running on AMD64. I have run into a similar problem some time back which is chronicled in the misc@ archives: